Mike Collins: John McCain was a man of his times, who rose above them

In his 1995 book, “The Nightingale’s Song,” the late Robert Timberg highlighted five men who graduated from the Naval Academy during the 1950s and 1960s.

Timberg’s title comes from the legend that a nightingale hatched without hearing the song of another nightingale will be mute. But once it hears another nightingale’s song, it will sing as though it had done so all its life.

With it, Timberg was referring to the silence of a large swath of his generation made dumb by the nation’s reaction to the Vietnam War, and in particular, the ugly way the country treated the veterans of that war.

Larson looked around the Naval Academy Cemetery and found a lush green spot on a hill, overlooking the Severn River.

As Larson, aide Mark Donohue and Larson’s wife drove...

In Timberg’s telling, Ronald Reagan was the nightingale that gave voice to patriotic Americans, including John McCain, Naval Academy Class of ’58. When Reagan made it cool to be proud of America — and serve in the military — the men he profiled, and thousands of others, found their voices. With all due respect to Timberg and the Gipper, McCain always had his own voice.

After retiring from the Navy, McCain turned to politics. He won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982, representing Arizona’s 1st District. Then four years later, in the face of a Democratic wave, he won the seat in the U.S. Senate that had been held by Barry Goldwater.

McCain was very much a Reagan man. He fully supported his defense buildup, foreign policy, and his economic plan. But he also shared Reagan’s love of country and bonhomie. But while McCain’s voice may first have been heard by the public when Reagan came to office, its emergence did not depend on him.

Whenever I have met any of the Americans held captive during the Vietnam War, I have been struck by their joie de vivre. Many would have imagined them as being hopelessly crippled psychologically by their experience and unable to emerge from their trauma.

McCain’s fellow alumnus of the “Hanoi Hilton,” Capt. Jack Fellowes, Class of ’56, epitomized that attitude. When asked by a young reporter if he had trouble adjusting to life in America after more than five years in a POW camp, Fellowes retorted: “Anyone who has trouble adjusting to hot steak and cold beer, they have problems.”

In the late 1990s, when the internet was new, every six months or so a meme would go out about Jane Fonda betraying American POWs. Capt. Mike McGrath, Class of ’62, was president of the POW/MIA Association, and told me that Fonda was guilty of a lot of things, but not this particular accusation.

Saying that spreading falsehoods allowed the truth to be dismissed along with the lies, he gave me permission to use his name to kill that rumor.

Writing about “The Boat School Boys,” Capt. Richard Stratton said McCain’s injuries were so severe that he could have accepted parole without violating the prisoner’s internal code. Instead, McCain chose to stay with his comrades.

Stratton noted that the camp commander, Maj. Bui, told McCain, “They have taught you too well, McCain. They have taught you too well.”

McCain embraced the same attitudes — and took them into politics. He could tell a great joke at his own expense and corrected a woman who claimed Barack Obama was an Arab during the 2008 campaign.

Look instead at the reflections of McCain and those in Annapolis who know how much the academy meant to him. The affection for the academy is in their words and feelings.

“I arrived a rebel...

He opposed torture in all its forms, even as many Americans cheered the idea of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the planner of the 9/11 attacks, being water-boarded. He spoke up forcefully for American values in that case and in so many others.

While Timberg’s analogy was poetic, McCain did not need Reagan to find his song. Through his words and his deeds, McCain sang it all his life, urging Americans to “be part of something bigger than your own self interest.”

Now, that’s a song worth singing.

Mike Collins of Annapolis graduated from the Naval Academy in 1984. He served until 2006 in the Navy and Naval Reserve, retiring at the rank of commander.